I am really embarrassed to admit this, but the problem was mine. Most
people would just ignore this and go away, but I feel I owe everyone an
explanation.

I have had three ISPs in my life. I used the same username always. But
the first two ISPs simply required the simple username fo login
(dfgrbac). Earthlink requires the full email address of the login user.
In Windows XP, all this is transparent to the user when signing up on
Earthlink.

They told me this originally when I set up SuSE 6.4, but since then I
forgot. I did a ppplog of a successful login on my old computer and
noticed the login name had the email address.

SuSE Linux 9.0 and it's Kinternet utility for logging in work fine.

My face is red!